Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a given site by using direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wishes to include a few images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very intuitive tool that will permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only two things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function which we offer you. While the regular way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can perform this automatically and you will simply have to choose the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the necessary file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without difficulties even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You could disable the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through the same section.